Revolution
is running a series of essays and talks from Bob
Avakian, Chairman of the RCP, USA, on issues and
contradictions involved in the socialist transition
to communism. This series will address in depth
a range of questions, including epistemology and
method; the theory of the state; dictatorship
and democracy in socialist society; the forms
of the new state power; the role of and policy
toward classes and strata intermediate between
the proletariat and the imperialists in the new
society; the importance of dissent; the communist
view toward art; the overall approach of “solid
core with a lot of elasticity”; and a host of
other questions involved in bringing into being
a society that would move toward communism and
be a vibrant society in which people would actually
want to live.

This week’s essay is taken from
Observations on Art and Culture, Science and
Philosophy, Bob Avakian, Insight
Press, Chicago, 2005.

As the world exists today and as people seek to change it, and particularly
in terms of the socialist transformation of society, as I see it there
are basically three alternatives that are possible. One is the world as
it is. Enough said about that. [Laughter.]

The second one is in a certain sense, almost literally and mechanically,
turning the world upside down. In other words, people who are now exploited
will no longer be exploited in the same way, people who now rule this
society will be prevented from ruling or influencing society in a significant
way. The basic economic structure of society will change, some of the
social relations will change, and some of the forms of political rule
will change, and some of the forms of culture and ideology will change,
but fundamentally the masses of people will not be increasingly and in
one leap after another drawn into the process of really transforming society.
This is really a vision of a revisionist society. If you think back to
the days of the Soviet Union, when it had become a revisionist society,
capitalist and imperialist in essence, but still socialist in name, when
they would be chided for their alleged or real violations of people’s
rights, they would often answer “Who are you in the West to be talking
about the violation of human rights—look at all the people in your
society who are unemployed, what more basic human right is there than
to have a job?”

Well, did they have a point? Yes, up to a point. But fundamentally what
they were putting forward, the vision of society that they were projecting,
was a social welfare kind of society in which fundamentally the role of
the masses of people is no different than it is under the classical form
of capitalism. The answer about the rights of the people cannot be reduced
to the right to have a job and earn an income, as basic as that is. There
is the question of are we really going to transform society so that in
every respect, not only economically but socially, politically, ideologically,
and culturally, it really is superior to capitalist society. A society
that not only meets the needs of the masses of people, but really is characterized
increasingly by the conscious expression and initiative of the masses
of people.

This is a more fundamental transformation than simply a kind of social
welfare, socialist in name but really capitalist in essence society, where
the role of the masses of people is still largely reduced to being producers
of wealth, but not people who thrash out all the larger questions of affairs
of state, the direction of society, culture, philosophy, science, the
arts, and so on. The revisionist model is a narrow, economist view of
socialism. It reduces the people, in their activity, to simply the economic
sphere of society, and in a limited way at that—simply their social
welfare with regard to the economy. It doesn’t even think about
transforming the world outlook of the people as they in turn change the
world around them.

And you cannot have a new society and a new world with the same outlook
that people are indoctrinated and inculcated with in this society. You
cannot have a real revolutionary transformation of society and abolition
of unequal social as well as economic relations and political relations
if people still approach the world in the way in which they’re conditioned
and limited and constrained to approach it now. How can the masses of
people really take up the task of consciously changing the world if their
outlook and their approach to the world remains what it is under this
system? It’s impossible, and this situation will simply reproduce
the great inequalities in every sphere of society that I’ve been
talking about.

The third alternative is a real radical rupture. Marx and Engels said
in the Communist Manifesto that the communist revolution represents
a radical rupture with traditional property relations and with traditional
ideas. And the one is not possible without the other. They are mutually
reinforcing, one way or the other.

If you have a society in which the fundamental role of women is to be
breeders of children, how can you have a society in which there is equality
between men and women? You cannot. And if you don’t attack and uproot
the traditions, the morals, and so on, that reinforce that role, how can
you transform the relations between men and women and abolish the deep-seated
inequalities that are bound up with the whole division of society into
oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited? You cannot.

So the third alternative is a real radical rupture in every sphere, a
radically different synthesis, to put it that way. Or to put it another
way, it’s a society and a world that the great majority of people
would actually want to live in. One in which not only do they not have
to worry about where their next meal is coming from, or if they get sick
whether they’re going to be told that they can’t have health
care because they can’t pay for it, as important as that is; but
one in which they are actually taking up, wrangling with, and increasingly
making their own province all the different spheres of society.

Achieving that kind of a society, and that kind of a world, is a very
profound challenge. It’s much more profound than simply changing
a few forms of ownership of the economy and making sure that, on that
basis, people’s social welfare is taken care of, but you still have
people who are taking care of that for the masses of people;
and all the spheres of science, the arts, philosophy, and all the rest
are basically the province of a few. And the political decision-making
process remains the province of a few.

To really leap beyond that is a tremendous and world-historic struggle
that we’ve been embarked on since the Russian revolution (not counting
the very short-lived and limited experience of the Paris Commune)—and
in which we reached the high point with the Chinese revolution and in
particular the Cultural Revolution—but from which we’ve been
thrown back temporarily.

So we need to make a further leap on the basis of summing up very deeply
all that experience. There are some very real and vexing problems that
we have to confront and advance through in order to draw from the best
of the past, but go further and do even better in the future.

Now I want to say a few things in this context about totalitarianism.
Just as an aside here, I find it very interesting that you can read innumerable
books delving deeply into the psyche of Stalin or Lenin or Mao—“What
went on in the deranged minds of these people [laughter] that
led them to think they could remake the world in their maddened image
[laughter] and led them, in the name of some greater moral
good, to bring great catastrophe on the humanity that they were affecting?”
I don’t know how many books I’ve seen like that. I have never
yet seen—maybe there are some, but I have never seen—a study
of the deranged psyche of Thomas Jefferson [laughter] or George
Washington: “How is it that a person could come to believe in their
own mind [laughter] that they were benefiting not only humanity
in general, but other human beings whom they owned? [laughter] What depth of psychological derangement must be involved in that? [laughter] What is more totalitarian than actually owning other
human beings?”

Or what about the study of the depths of the depraved minds of Lyndon
Johnson or Ronald Reagan [laughter], who murdered millions
of people, including vast numbers of children? “What must have gone
wrong, somewhere in their childhood or somewhere else in their lives?
[laughter] What demented ideas must they somehow have internalized
that led them to believe that in the name of the shining city on the hill,
or whatever [laughter], they had the right and the obligation
to slaughter thousands and millions of innocent people?”

I have never seen those studies. Certainly I haven’t read about
them in the New York Times Book Review section. [laughter]

Still, there are some real questions that are raised about totalitarianism
by the ideologues and the “intellectual camp followers” of
the imperialists that do need to be taken on. In particular, they make
the charge that in a society which they call totalitarian, but which is
in reality the dictatorship of the proletariat, there is first of all
an official ideology that everyone has to profess belief in, in order
to get along in that society. And there is an official politics that everyone
has to be involved in, in order to get along in that society and not get
in trouble. Well, what about this?

Fundamentally, this is a distortion of what has gone on in socialist
societies: why these revolutions were necessary in the first place and
what they were seeking to accomplish and to overcome, and how they were
going about doing that. The reality is that, for the great masses of people
in capitalist (and certainly in feudal) society, they are barred from
really being involved in any significant way in official politics and
the politics that actually affect the affairs of state and the direction
of society. And they are indoctrinated with an outlook and methodology
and ideology that prevents them—discourages them and actively obstructs
them—from really understanding the world as it is and changing it
consciously. And that is what socialist revolutions seek to change, as
well as bringing about fundamental changes in the economy and the social
relations.

But what about this question of official ideology that everyone has to
profess? Well, I think we have more to sum up about that from the history
of socialist society and the dictatorship of the proletariat so far.

With regard to the question of the party, I think two things are definitely
true. One, you need a vanguard party to lead this revolution and to lead
the new state. Two, that party has to have an ideology that unifies it,
an ideology that correctly reflects and enables people to consciously
change reality, which is communist ideology.

But, more broadly, should everyone in society have to profess this ideology
in order to get along? No. Those who are won over to this ideology should
proclaim it and struggle for it. Those who are not convinced of it should
say so. Those who disagree with it should say that. And there should be
struggle. Something has to lead—the correct ideology that really
enables people to get at the truth, and to do something with it in their
interests, has to lead; but that doesn’t mean everyone should have
to profess it, in my opinion. And this is just my opinion. But it’s
worth digging into this a bit, it’s worth exploring and wrangling
with the question.